Inside Marlowe, J.AR OFFICE Lets a Heritage Brisbane Building Do the Talking.

Editorial styling: Nina George + Elizabeth Bird. Photography: Jessie Prince.

Ever since J.AR OFFICE first landed on my radar back in October 2023, I haven’t been able to look away. Brisbane’s Jared Webb has a particular kind of creative intelligence that isn’t easy to articulate, which is saying something for someone who makes a living doing exactly that. He pulls together seemingly unrelated genres, eras, references and details and produces something that transcends the sum of its parts—something we now lazily shorthand as a ‘vibe’, because the real explanation requires a longer conversation and probably a glass of wine. It takes mastery, vision, risk appetite, and a very specific kind of energy to pull off project after project at this standard. Marlowe is his fourth collaboration with The Fanda Group.

Where it’s other venues—Central, Norte, Sueno—hero international cuisines, Marlowe plants its flag somewhere far more personal: a reimagining of the Australian bistro, set inside a heritage-listed Art Deco apartment building in Brisbane’s CBD.

The concept channels the particular glamour of the ’80s and ’90s power lunch—that era when being seen at the right table with the right people was its own form of social currency. Webb describes it as “a refined balance of ’80s and ’90s nostalgia against pre-war design”—and you feel exactly that the moment you walk in. Red marmoleum floors against crisp white tablecloths, polished chrome lighting, collected silverware, and a menu that elevates so-called ‘daggy’ classics—smoked trout on hashbrown, cheddar scones with chicken pâté, coral trout Wellington. It’s nostalgic without being sentimental, luxurious without being loud.

What makes Marlowe extraordinary, though, isn’t the concept—it’s the execution under constraint. Strict heritage overlays meant J.AR OFFICE had almost no licence to touch the original building fabric. Internal walls, horsehair plaster ceilings, windows and door frames all remain intact. The original stairwell still connects the floors. Former bathrooms became wine storage and intimate booth seating. And then there’s the heritage-listed air raid shelter in the basement—previously a tobacco and cigar store, the former tenant’s hand-painted signage still intact. I mean, come on!

Working across two levels, 22 rooms and a total of nine separate dining arenas (each super intimate with a maximum capacity of ten people), J.AR OFFICE masterplanned the operational requirements of a full-scale restaurant without disturbing the building’s inherently domestic character.

As Webb puts it, “the existing bones and building fabric dictated the operation of the venue; in other projects, it’s been the opposite.” That inversion is the key to understanding what Marlowe actually is. This isn’t a restaurant that was designed and then inserted into a building. The building came first—always—and every design decision followed from that reality. That philosophy extends to the experience of dining there, too. Webb talks about channelling the feeling of “having dinner at a friend’s house”—and it shows in the details: a large kitchen table positioned in front of the pass, lighting trained entirely on the food and produce rather than the interior, meals arriving under a silver cloche. The domesticity isn’t just decorative, it’s also operational.

The material palette reflects this rigour. Drawn from Le Corbusier’s Architectural Polychromy of 1931—the same year the building was constructed, which is a detail I absolutely love—sky blue, butter cream and deep crimson anchor a scheme of walnut timber joinery, polished chrome, and jute marmoleum cut to tile format, referencing the linoleum floors of your grandmother’s kitchen. Custom lighting on chrome posts avoids any penetration of the horsehair plaster ceilings. Even the acoustic treatment is embedded in the material logic: carpet inserts under dining areas, marmoleum inlays that mirror the table shapes above them. Every decision has a reason. Nothing is arbitrary.

Brisbane has no shortage of shiny new venues built from scratch and dressed up to feel like they have a history. Marlowe actually has one—and Jared Webb has had the intelligence, patience and creative conviction to let it speak. If this is what the Australian bistro looks like now, consider me a regular.

[Images courtesy of J.AR OFFICE. Editorial styling by Nina George + Elizabeth Bird. Photography by Jessie Prince.]